Hi all,

I've recently bought a Sonos music streaming system, and currently I'm busy 'perfecting' the tags of all my MP3 files.

Even though I've been pretty meticulous about this in the past (or so I thought), it still a huge task because here and there of course files have slipped under my radar.

I would also like to add album art to the files wherever possible.

Now, I've noticed that the latest versions of WinAmp have a certain tag feature called 'Auto Tag'. This works surprisingly well! It fills in about all I need, and it fills it in correctly and the way I like it (every word capitalised). The downside is of course this still demands me doing all this work file by file.

Isn't there a tagging utility out there which can automate this process? I've tried Tag & Rename, but even though this utility allows for album art to be integrated into the files, it doesn't do it in a batch. As far as I can see, it also doesn't have an 'Auto tag' feature like WinAmp does. It can tag via the FreeDB database, but that would mean I can only use this feature for a list of files only from an album/CD, and the files must be in the same sequence as the original album.
I basically also want to use this on folders containing all sorts of files. (eg. I have a folder called 'Top40', containing lots and lots of Top40 hits, but obviously not entire albums.

Soooo... is there a program out there that can do all that? Alternatively, using a combination of programs would also be ok (eg. a program that can batch tag the files, followed by one that can insert the album art per file)

Thanks for any info you guys can provide!

You should look at the programs supporting MusicBrainz. As far as I recall, the taggers all had pretty ugly UI, but this is the only system around that can do what you're looking for as far as I know.

Perhaps with the exception of album art. Once the tags are correctly set however, you can use another tool to batch download and imbed cover art. These programs will hit some common sources for album art, but in the end, I usually do this manually. My favorite places for covers are iTunes music store and RateYourMusic.com - if I don't get a high quality and decent resolution scan from there, I make a note to scan the cover myself, which I will do in batch once every couple of months.

Oh... I also suggest you download MP3 Tag which you can use to remove unwanted tags. Depending on what ripper/encoder you've used, you may find it has inserted both v1 and v2 tags into your files. You will most definitely want to delete any v1 data and keep only v2. I suggest using id3v2.3 specifically. This is easy to set up in MP3 tag such that pressing the "write" button will convert and save id3v2.3 and pressing the "delete" button will automatically remove all other tags versions/formats (you need to specify which tags to keep and which to delete in its preferences).

I believe this is one of the things that Media Monkey does. It's billed as a music manager, but I'm sure you don't have to keep all your music in there in order to keep your songs tagged.

Thanks for the suggestions guys! I'll give both methods a try! I'll report here how it went!

Cheers!

Media Monkey has a much better UI than the programs that work with MusicBrainz, mainly because they've copied iTunes.

However, this is what bothers me about its automatic tag fixing:



Amazon isn't a very good source for cover images nor for tag data. Certainly FreeDB tag data really sucks because it's prone to user input errors without any correction mechanisms. AMG is sometimes decent, but it can be very spotty with different releases.

The beauty of the MusicBrainz apps is that if you want you can run a MusicIP analysis on all your music to tag it with a fingerprint. That fingerprint can then be used to find data on the specific tracks even if no other track data is present in any tag.

Personally, I do all my tag corrections manually using iTunes as an editor. I do lookups on MusicBrainz sometimes, but primarily use RateYourMusic.com Initially tag data is populated from FreeDB at rip-time. And I've been doing this for years, so now it's only incremental. I don't think I'd like to manually update an entire collection from scratch, starting now.

As a slight follow-up, I just wanted to mention that I installed and uninstalled Media Monkey tonight. I did let it read all my music to see what it could do.

It doesn't seem to support Compilations nor doe sit have any concept of total discs or tracks. As in "1 of 2" or "1 of 10"

I'm not risking my existing tag data to that program. I was looking at it for use with a plugin to add lyrics to my tags for the purpose of searching (I don't otherwise ever plan to display or use the lyrics for anything else)

Songbird seems to finally be at a 1.0 version, so I'm giving that another look. I'm installing it in Windows, though it supports Win/Linux/Mac on Intel platforms. It's done in XUL (like Firefox) and support plugins, of which I also grabbed a Lyrics downloader.

To be fair to them, I haven't really seen any media manager application handle compilations and multiple albums well.


Yeah, I've been using Songbird 1.0 for a couple weeks, and I like some parts of it and not others. So far the thing that's really killing it for me is that it takes an eternity to start up for some reason on my system. I don't have the newest computer at the moment, but still, it shouldn't take as long as it does. But my favorite aspect at the moment is the plugin system. I LOVE the Seeqpod plugin. I've been using the site for a while, but it's more convenient to have it in that application.

But anyway, Songbird won't help Archeon here. It doesn't do tagging that I know of, and I haven't run across any plugins to handle that.

I think it's worthwhile to install Media Monkey, run it on the files (perhaps without compilations or multi-disc albums), and then use whatever media manager you want. You don't have to keep Media Monkey as the manager after using it. Up until recently, I didn't use any music manager, and I still tend to use my folder structure more than Songbird anyway.

I've just tested Songbird and it's got a long way to go, even with plugins, to match iTunes. I thought iTunes was light in the metadata editing department, but Songbird is absolutely spartan. They've copied essentially iTunes versions prior to 7. Also known as the iTunes-sucks years. I think they have at least another year or two before they get close to filling in their holes (based on development progress so far).

The Songbird developers have claimed that they're using a "best practices" approach to UI, but it's plain to see they simply used iTunes as a template. It was the source for pretty much every aspect of the Songbird UI.

Anyway, I don't need a manager to do anything but tagging, so I'm fine with using Songbird for nothing more than Lyrics right now. iTunes does everything else better for my music collection (except handle files other than MP3 and AAC).

I've never used a manager to control where/how the music files are stored though. I keep things in Artist/album folders for that and just let the management programs look at the files once I've put them where they go on disk.

After using Media Monkey though, I would strongly recommend taking a look first at the MusicBrainz tools. They're smaller and lighter and seem to be designed for what was requested, tagging.

If I could have iTunes metadata editing pumped-up I wouldn't even look at anything else right now, including other taggers. Unfortunately, regardless of what you want to use, with the current tools available, I think the process will always involve multiple of them. For instance, MP3 Tag, which I've mentioned before, is excellent for being able to see absolutely any tag in your file - as well as being able to create any tag you want, even if it's something completely custom. I need to use this to clear and set tags other programs don't support. Mainly because Slim Center does support and read those tags which can cause issues in my music database.

I've tried MusiBrainz , but, while it works, I found it always shows all the info of the entire album/cd, while I only need the info for the track I did the search on.

BUT I've found an easier way! It's actually do-able to do batch lookups in WinAmp itself. Just put all the MP3's you want to tag into your playlist, select all you want to tag (usually ctrl-A), then right click on the files, send to: -> Auto Tag. Then a batch windows appears and all files are looked up and tagged. When all lookups have finished, you can choose to apply the changes or not...

This works wonderfully well! It also fills in the ID3v1 tags, but those are easily enough deleted all in Tag&Rename afterwards. Yay!

All I need now is a utility which can batch-tag album art as well and I'm golden! I'll have a look at MediaMonkey for this.

Will WinAmp populate the tags if they start out blank? Or just correct some missing tags if the artist and track name are already pre-filled? Or I suppose it can work with artist and album name and then track times to figure out the track names.

Is it producing track labels that you're satisfied with? I generally have to make manual edits to all data sources because so many people use different conventions. Even when a convention has been standardized, such as at RateYourMusic.com, it's not necessarily something I agree with.

For instance, braces () only appear in my song titles if they're part of the title. All Remix attributes and credits always go in square braces [] at the end of the title. Such as "This is the Song Name [Groovy Remix]"

Guest artists or duets always get listed with the artist and not as part of the title. I then use the BAND (aka Album Artist) tag to store the name of the artist for the album (for non compilation albums). So I'll have a song by "David Bowie and Mick Jagger" or maybe "David Bowie feat. Placebo" for example.

For artwork I would first start out with iTunes. Let it download art for whatever it can. It will store this in files on your drive, not within the tunes. Then use a third-party program to imbed the images into the tunes. When you're done, then use whatever other solutions you want for the tracks that still lack art.

I suggest this because iTunes seems to always have higher resolution/quality art than sources used by these other programs (most of them rely on Amazon, AMG, etc..)

Argh, I just noticed that Songbird also force-writes ID3v1 and will re-write all v2 tags as v2.4 instead of preserving the current version.

Yeah, this program is never going to be at the level of iTunes. The developers just don't have the design skills nor the forethought. With the plugins it will be better, but it's still like 1000 monkeys at 1000 typewriters.

The program is much more of a web browser than it is a music manager. Using XUL is one thing, simply making a UI within what is essentially a web browser, is something else. Totally unimpressed for the number of years this has been in development and the money and people put into it.

Yes. That's what's so cool about it. You can have a file called 1.mp3 and no tag, and WinAmp will fill the tag in.


Generally, I'm satisfied with what WinAmp produces. I only actually need Title/Artist/Album/Year. The Genre will be filled in by me, but that won't be hard since I've categorised my files by genre, so a batch file process in Tag&Rename or MP3TagStudio will do the trick.

I have noticed though that WinAmp sometimes also fills in comment fields and other stuff I'm not happy with. (like 'encoded by') That's why I will, after the files have been tagged by Winamp, run the files through MP3TagStudio and delete everything from the tags, except for the Title/Artist/Album/Year fields which I require.

After this is all done, I will also rename all the file names with my preferred <artist> - <title>.mp3 file name mask. In the case of these specific files, I don't need tracks numbers (and maybe I don't even need album names), since these are all separate music files, not connected to an album. (nor do I want them to be)

But granted, being the perfectionist that I am, I will probably manually check all the files as well. Something I'm not looking forward to with 20.000+ files.


This is also the way I prefer it. My guess is this will be one of those things I will have to edit manually sometimes.


Hmmm...that's not a bad idea. In your own specific example, you mean you would put David Bowie in the Album Artist field and "feat. Mick Jagger" in the artist field? Or the other way around? If you were to put "feat. Mick Jagger" in the Artist field, wouldn't that give you problems when browsing by artist? (unless you wanted to play all the "feat. Mick Jagger" files in one queue?)

I've already noticed that Tag&Rename doesn't really like this. I had tagged one of my Mp3 files like that: Quincy Jones & Michael Jackson - Liberian Girl. I've put Quincy Jones in the Album Artist field, and Michael Jackson in the Artist field. When I then ran my usual <artist> - <title>.mp3 file name mask, I noticed that Tag&Rename always made a file named Quincy Jones - Liberian Girl.mp3. (even though Tag&Rename also has a Album artist file name mask, but seems to ignore it). Hmmm... Maybe that MP3 file tagger program you've suggested before does a better job of this...


I'll have a look at it, even though I absolutely hate iTunes. But I can imagine them having the largest album art library. Which third party program would you suggest to embed the images into the tunes? Because I can do this with WinAmp again, but in this case, it would be a file-by-file method, and I'm really not looking forward to this...

Thanks for all the help!

Check out Mp3TagTools as well, it can be a little tricky to set up, but it's pretty powerful and supports batch editing

I will! Thanks!

Ok, a little self-reply here because I need a bit of help with what is probably a stupid question, but I can't for the life of me figure this one out.

I'm currently busy re-tagging all my files. This will be a much bigger chore than I had bargained for, but hey, isn't this always the case with this kind of stuff?
I've been trying to download album art using iTunes. This works, but for some reason iTunes only adds the album art to its own library and not to the mp3 tag of the file itself. This is a pain, because I really want the art to end up in the file itself. (it's no use to my Sonos system if it doesn't)

Surely there must be a way to get this done? I could have sworn I've passed by a program that specialises in downloading iTunes album art to a .jpg file on the hard disk, but now I can't seem to find this program again. Help!
(I've also tried Media Monkey, but while I found a way to get it done using that program, it's such a hassle that I really would like to use an alternative...)

Thx!

You want to run a script that will cause iTunes to embed its art into the MP3 files. On the Mac this is super-easy to do.

I actually came up with the original manual method before I ever saw anyone else talk about it and posted it to my blog ( How to embed iTunes album art into mp3 tracks). This works in both Mac OS and Windows as far as I know. But it's really only good for doing one album at a time unless you're a masochist

In iTunes the manual method can be automated with AppleScript which plugs right into iTunes. For Windows you can use JavaScript and I believe I already mentioned earlier that there exists at least one script out there to do this for you.

Let me look for it...

Ok, I can't find the script I saw earlier. I'm almost positive I saw the equivalent embedding script to run in Windows.

Here's a one that saves the artwork along side your tracks. Conceivably you could then use this other script to embed the artwork files saved in by the previous script.

I found these auto downloaders Album Art Downloader and Album Cover Art Downloader.

I think Tag&Rename will add the file folder.jpg to the audio in the same folder.

I'd skip the two programs you linked to. They seem more trouble than they're worth and they still won't bring down the best images, which live only at iTunes.

If Tag&Rename can pick up the folder.jpg then that might be a workable if you're already using it. The second link I posted should be fairly straight-forward though if not.

Of course one could also just buy a Mac. It has a complete and total lack of any half-decent third-party tagger programs, but AppleScripting iTunes provides a lot of great benefits for managing stuff like this. Even if it's not blindingly quick.

The first program you suggest I don't know, but the second one I've already found myself. But after reading the warning on its homepage I was reluctant to use it. It warns about possible mp3 file corruption when using the program on a non-English windows version...

I use Tag & Rename as my main program for mp3 tagging. Have been for years and I absolutely love it. It now also does cover art and can even tag entire albums with art. It's just a pain when you want to tag separate files (like Cd singles that I've ripped), because that forces me to do file-by-file tagging... I've also noticed that most album art taggers -iTunes included- lean heavy on the 'album' field of an mp3 tag. If that field wasn't filled in, it won't find any cover art. That also forces me to fill in that field now for all my CD single mp3 files. (on the other hand, most get filled in now by WinAmp's Auto Tag feature )

Thanks Bruno! I'll have a look at that script of yours. Hopefully it will work equally well on Windows.


I'm very willing to go the extra mile to get this done, but that's stretching it a bit though.

I have no "loose" tracks in my MP3 collection. CD Singles are still releases that have a proper "album" name, the name of the single. Every track should contain an album name as the indicator of its source. It's also how you'll be able to browse releases (by album) with your Sonos (or other database driven music system such as Slim Center).

iTunes will likely not contain cover art for everything in your collection, so you'll invariably have to do some manual labor at some point. By far the easiest and most complete site to use for that is RateYourMusic.com in my opinion. Mainly because it's easy to browse by artist and see a relatively complete discography, but also because they tend to have cover art for nearly everything in their database, even obscure material.

I think running a script to pull the images from iTunes as folder.jpg and then using Tag&Rename sounds like the best solution under Windows right now. Of course you could also try and find that script I found that does the embedding directly from iTunes.

If you have the option of using a Mac for a little while you might consider that. Bring all your music on HD over to this Mac, fire up iTunes and dump everything into it. With an iTunes account signed in, select all, right-click for the option to get album art, wait and when completed, run the AppleScript to embed the iTunes art. http://dougscripts.com/itunes/scripts/ss.php?sp=embedart

It's going to take a while to add a large collection to iTunes, so visiting the Apple Store to do this may not be a great idea. Oh, your disk will also have to be formatted FAT32 unless you install MacDrive on your Windows box to format it HFS+ (or unless you install a Writable NTFS driver on the Mac)

I use MediaMonkey on windows to automatically download and embed artwork into my mp3's. I do all my other mp3 management from iTunes.

Winamp will autotag files in batch mode.
Select all the tracks then RMB>SendTo>AutoTag.